Bath, 11–16 March 2007 (event 0667)

This is the third in a series of British Council seminars directed by Stephen Hagen focusing on developing the Enterprising University. The series examines components of the enterprising university in order to pool and develop expertise on making universities, and university systems, more entrepreneurial.

Entrepreneurship education is now a growth area across the world. But there are many curricular modules and a multiplicity of objectives, content, methodologies for learning about, and teaching, entrepreneurship in universities. The aim of the seminar is to review and investigate innovative methods for teaching Enterprise and developing entrepreneurial competence at university level. The seminar makes a distinction between ‘enterprise’ and ‘entrepreneurship’ education and reviews models of innovative enterprise teaching and methods of developing entrepreneurial minds.

There is the fundamental issue of how to develop the curriculum. Enterprise is not a universally recognised academic subject and has not yet entered the curriculum of many universities. For some, entrepreneurship is generally taken to mean a set of behavioural characteristics, such as the willingness to take the risks involved in starting and managing a business and the ability to spot and act on new business opportunities. Entrepreneurship education is two-dimensional; on the one hand it seeks to develop a broad range of entrepreneurial skills, attitudes and behaviours such as risk taking and creative thinking, on the other it focuses on developing knowledge about entrepreneurship.

The seminar will look at three main areas:

• the extent to which we can ‘teach’ students to be entrepreneurial, as well as covering the variety of successful courses – e.g. training students with specific training on how to start (and run) a business, including developing in them the capacity to draft a real business plan and the skills associated with methods of identifying and assessing business opportunities.
• the distinction between ‘for-profit’ enterprise programmes and social enterprise programmes, which place an increasing emphasis on business ethics, enviro-social enterprise and charitable operations. The seminar will focus on the distinction between teaching for social enterprise and teaching for profitable enterprise.
• practical examples of Enterprise Centres, Innovation Centres and Student Hubs (which encourage and support embryonic business ideas by providing special loans, business facilities, mentorship, etc.), business plan competitions and short intensive courses and their relationship to mainstream undergraduate modules and masters degrees in enterprise and entrepreneurship.

Who should attend this event
This seminar will be of particular interest to academics, enterprise educators and teachers, curriculum developers and enterprise professionals, managing enterprise centres and business parks on campus. Participants from the previous seminars are welcome to attend.